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Microsoft Brings DirectX 12 To Windows 7 (anandtech.com)
Microsoft has announced a form of DirectX 12 that will support Windows 7. "Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft; and indeed it's not slated to be a general-purpose solution like DX12 on Win10," reports AnandTech. "Instead, Microsoft has stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well. As a consumer it's great to see them supporting their product ten years after it launched, but with the entire OS being put out to pasture in nine months, it seems like an odd time to be dedicating resources to bringing it new features." From the report: For some background, Microsoft's latest DirectX API was created to remove some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing for developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. There's many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.
Today's announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they'd have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. It's just bizarre.
Today's announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they'd have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. It's just bizarre.
Seems like a great way to get people to install a patch that includes a nag screen. Just attach something of value to it!
I distinctly remember MS saying it was impossible for win 7 to get any newer DX versions because of the infrastructure in win 10 they said allows those new versions of DX to function.
Weird, almost like they were lying?
Still even exists?
M$ has a pretty bad reputation at end of cycle, breaking programs, blocking use of documents with the next version, doing all sorts of crap. DX12 run on windows 7 at your risk, you can bet when it break all over the place, M$ will say but windows 7 is no longer supported.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Except older computers could run win 10 if it wasted fewer resources on telemetry and other things many people do not want...My computer is 10 years old running win 7 and working just fine. I have no interest in win 10 for a number of reasons...maybe microsoft should be required to maintain security patching of older OS's for a longer time. To use a car analogy car manufacturers are required to provide parts for all models for 30 years. Why should microsoft get to just stop when they don't want to do it any longer. People and businesses have a lot invested and it can cost quite a bit to migrate from one version of Windows to the next. It's not like computers are progressing at breakneck speeds anymore.
Otherwise, why go to all that trouble?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They probably found out, that their new Nag-Popup needs DirectX 12 to work.
Security updates yes for a while.
Games? That should be time for a new computer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Makes complete sense to me. Things are really messed up in the consumer desktop space...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wish I had mod points.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon.
Thankfully I disabled MS updates years ago to prevent Install Windows10' pop-ups. I dodged two bullets!
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
aka
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
They're charging for updates past January 14th, 2020. So after that you have to pay by the year for updates. I think they did this because it's either buy Windows 10 or buy security patches for Windows 7 i.e they earn money either way so let's just throw them a bone to make us earn more money.
According to Wikipedia "DirectX 12 was announced by Microsoft at GDC on March 20, 2014".
Really, Microsnot just decided to ignore the Windows 7 user for a bunch of years hoping that they would upgrade, or buy computer with Win10.
It is NOT newsworthy that it happened... and unfortunately, it's not even newsworthy any-more that Microsnot doesn't give a crap about their customers.
DX12 was never difficult to bring to Windows 7. The sole reason it was only released to Windows 10 was to drive adoption of Win 10.
There is a large portion of the world who don't have the money to upgrade their computers every-time a new Windows version is released.
Running a "modern" version of Window on an older computer will make the computer run like crap.
But as Microsoft needs to keep the game creators and users happy, old computers/OS's need newer DirectX versions
What about Windows 8, that's what I have. It's still got plenty of time left for support. This is maybe Microsoft's way of saying "maybe we could support you, but we won't because we hate you."
China where WOW and windows 7 is big they want that market
It isn't. part of DX12 has been ported, i.e. the easy bit that would not require significant OS changes. They ported the user mode sections all the underlying API's remain the same. So I imagine games would need to be selective/careful about what they use as it won't have the same levels of optimisation so parts that perform well on win 10 may well be dogs on win 7 without the underlying plumbing.
What about Windows 8, that's what I have. It's still got plenty of time left for support. This is maybe Microsoft's way of saying "maybe we could support you, but we won't because we hate you."
Just business, Win10 is 55%, Win7 34%, Win8+8.1 9% and 2.5% still run XP/Vista. Still I wonder why the heck Microsoft would bother in their final year of support, it's either a trap to make it buggy and force people to Win10 or they're having cold feet and is considering a "Windows Classic" version? I mean 34% still prefer your ten year old OS and you even tried to give them a "free" upgrade? It's pretty clear the market thinks Win7 works just fine...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
According to Steam hardware survey 25% of people are still using Windows 7 which is a pretty high number for an OS that old.
Of course, that's helped by Microsoft themselves making a series of stupid changes in newer Windows versions
I refer you to Win32s and WinG, as well as several components of Games for Windows Live.
If you're not familiar with those, they were all released by MIcrosoft, but not part of the core OS, but required to run a multitude of bits of software, never quite elevating the underlying system to the realms of full compatibility across the board but just bodging it enough that some "big money" software developer could bribe Microsoft into expanding their market a little, temporarily.
GfW Live, for example, worked fine on XP for many years. Then it stopped. Then it worked fine on 7 for many years. Then there were problems. All to do with underlying technology upgrades, (e.g. .NET Framework, etc.) that it was reliant on, but yet never quite pushing you out (I got Toy Soldiers on Steam to continue to run on XP with GfW Live by dropping in some DLLs available from the Microsoft site, but it was far from easy - if you were a casual user it was basically impossible after a certain period of time as GfW Live demanded things that only Windows 7 actually had).
This is going to be a "mini-DX12" to literally run WoW because WoW have asked for it. That's it. No different to how Microsoft never actually shipped a proper OpenGL DLL for many years.
Microsoft won't give you full DX12, even though it's perfectly viable, because they know you then won't upgrade past 7 for another few years. What they'll do is throw you a bone, because WoW are basically paying them to, that'll work for a small subset of programs. It'll work for a couple of years but not for enough to keep you "DX12 compatible" in any significant way.
This is the biggest problem with Microsoft.... planned obsolescence and pretending to give a damn.
Running a "modern" version of Window on an older computer will make the computer run like crap.
I disagree with this. Remember the performance hit of Windows Vista? It was huge. It was the number one reason people hated it. However, all versions of Windows after Vista, seemed to run faster on the same hardware. Windows 7 was basically called "Windows Vista fixed" or "done right", and the success of Windows 7 was huge. Now around 2012, Microsoft came up with Windows 8, and one of the claims why you should upgrade was that Windows 8 does about anything faster, and it did. After all Windows 8 was being marketed as a viable tablet OS. The same claim was made for Windows 10. After all, Windows 10 had to be compatible with a number of Surface tablets with _only_ 2GB of RAM, and it did well.
I recall that circa 2016 when Windows 10 just came out, a distant acquaintance of my family who were also very broke fresh and computer illiterate immigrants begged me to fix a 2009 Dell PC they picked up from a trash bin at some hospital. They said they wanted to setup a PC for their child room. I took upon this project simply out of sheer curiosity about just how useful or useless a PC with Core2 Duo CPU and 2GB of memory (max) can be.
This PC had a license for a version of Windows Vista, and after getting hold of the media and all of the updates, this turned out to be a passable "kiosk" PC, just in case if all you do is use gmail or watch youtube. Then I decided to try Windows 10 on the same machine. Back then there still existed a loophole allowing to upgrade from Vista to Windows 10 for free, and it worked! So anyways, the performance of this PC under 10 was at least as good as with Vista. Moreover, even Windows 10 haters like me have to agree that 10 is a lot better than Vista in terms of software usability today (I really hate the look and feel of Vista). The core of this story is that a decent PC from as far back as 2009 is still good enough to run Windows 10 even with 2GB of RAM (just don't open a gazillion of tabs in Firefox), and that Windows versions past-Vista really did improve performance.
Why did this happen? For one, operating systems have become very mature. You can't compare the security features of Windows 7 vs Windows 95 and ME. 7 already had most things built in, like modern file systems, multiuser support, firewall, robust networking and multitasking, etc. At some point, software manufacturers see that there is no pressing need to add more "bloat" to something that's already mature. Another issue is that we can't take hardware upgrades for granted any more. Industry experts agree that shrinking chip manufacturing process below 7nm is basically already hitting the wall. This means, no more Moore's Law. No more "free" CPU cores. No more "free" doubling of RAM or SSD storage every 2-3 years. The picture of the PC that's manufactured today is likely to be very similar to one made five years from now. So I really don't think any significant software company still thinks that "hardware is free".
According to Steam hardware survey 25% of people are still using Windows 7 which is a pretty high number for an OS that old.
I don't know about your references, but I will take your word for it. What's really surprising is that this 25% number, if it's true, coming from Steam!! The PC games company! Why is this interesting? Because this is a statistic pertaining to the consumer PC user community, not corporate/government. It is well known that organizations are very slow to upgrade the OS because they're very conservative (don't fix what's not broken) and their IT departments are overworked anyways. But to see a Steam survey saying that 25% of its users are running Windows 7 is highly significant. Shockingly, so many people still prefer running a 10 year old OS. This is very telling about how badly received Windows 10 is.
Most older games (pre-2018) simply runs better on Windows 7 than Windows 10.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Having said that there's a major problem with this update mechanism: OEMs will eventually stop releasing up to date drivers for new Windows 10 releases and you'll end up with a Windows 10 PC/laptop where some piece of your equipment no longer works.
I'm guessing it has nothing to do with that and was a very reluctant decision, mostly based around Microsoft wanting developers to adopt DirectX12 and finding that impossible as long as it wasn't supported on Windows 7. I don't think it has anything to do with them believing Windows 7 will be around for one month or one century.
They'd have ported it to XP if it was easy, but in practice porting to 7 was probably trivial, as Windows 10 and Windows 7 aren't that different underneath (at least, for this kind of thing, whereas anything pre-Vista has to deal with significantly different under-the-hood APIs.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Certainly sounds like the left hand not talking to the right hand sort of thing.
Some department that was dedicated to making this happen just quietly working away oblivious (or not given layoffs) to the fact that they are producing something that probably shouldn't be produced at all, and the resources better spent elsewhere...
It's just for one single game, and it's not a full DX12 just an emulation layer and there are no performance or graphics improvements. Thus, Blizzard could decide to make World of Warcraft only use DX12 and drop DX11 support, possibly it makes life easier for those game developers. But still no actual benefit to World of Warcraft players in any way. That might be a dumb move though as a game that size is making a lot of money from long term customers probably still using DX9 on lower end computers. Sure, Microsoft loves screwing the customers and doing things that cause great controversy with its customers; but most normal businesses realize that they have to treat their customers nicely if they want to retain them.
There's no real reason to upgrade from windows 8.1 to 10, support is still ongoing for quite some time and I don't know of any games I would ever play that have DX12 support and no plans to get a new graphics card for a several years.
I don't know what Microsoft is thinking here. The intentionally did not backport DX12 despite it being relatively simple to do, for the purpose of encouraging people to upgrade (which didn't work really since DX12 was not seen as an important upgrade). But then doing this just for WoW is strange, Microsoft doesn't own Blizzard so they get no direct benefit here as opposed to making this work for their own few (uninspiring) games. Maybe it's must more evidence that different departments within Microsoft are unable to talk to each other.
Yeah, very likely Win 7 has a higher penetration in corporate settings and non-gaming home users. Also take into account that Win 7 users got the option of updating to 10 for free.
I assume you're talking about desktop PCs?
A lot of laptop type PCs come with custom software and drivers that allow people to use all the little peripheral features that come with the machine.
And while Vista stuff is mostly compatible with Windows 7, a lot of the Windows Vista and 7 stuff is not compatible with Windows 10. So unsuspecting customers start their free Windows 10 upgrade and it is breaking shit all over the place. A lot of those little features they've gotten used to won't work any longer.
Unfortunately for them, the notebook vendors usually do not provide software support for machines that are older than just a couple of years. Hence if your notebook is a couple of years older than Win 10 chances are that you'll regret upgrading to Win 10. Maybe you can blame them partially for the situation. Maybe this move from Microsoft with their "final" Windows version will break that cycle for the future. But at the end of the day it still Microsoft who blindly and stubbornly forced their crapware onto computer illiterates without considering their circumstances.
Oh, and if you start comparing things with Windows Vista, you can pretty much anything look good in comparison.
Software is not: the copyrighted bit is the source, not the non-expressive object code. So if you think to pretend this is a slipper slope problem, then think again. And, no the execution of the code is a PERFORMANCE, not the fixed-in-medium expression required for copyrights.
A performance by WHOM?
It is MY computer running the compiled code.
And linux doesn't even support NTFS 3.0 which is 20 years old (Yes, you can install a 3rd party driver like NTFS-3G, which will get you most of the way there), but you can install ext2 drivers in windows too, lol.
AC lots of brands have Windows 10 laptops for sale.
Shop around and configure a new Windows 10 ready laptop.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why should much older OS be supported for years AC?
Take that cost developers have to spend on an old OS and make the new OS better.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"